Albert from Laowai Chinese reckons there are 409 possible pinyin sound combinations. However, the actual number of syllables is somewhat debatable, because different pinyin charts and dictionaries list different possible combinations. Here is a chart that I created that includes 412 combinations:

The three extra combinations that I included that Albert didn’t are tei 忒, kei 剋, and rua 挼.

On the other hand, here’s a list that includes 416 possible sounds. Although that list omits dia, rua, and tei, it includes these that I don’t: diang, shong, yai, nia, sei, lün, and lüan. But I’m not so sure these are valid, since I can’t find any characters for these combinations.

Prelude: This is an off-topic post featuring arcane and obscure information about the Chinese language.

As an engineer / statistician / nerd, I am always classifying, analyzing, and quantifying the world around me. I am fascinated by the underlying structure and logic of all things, even things that are theoretically outside the realm of engineers. I also love tables and graphs.

Therefore, you can imagine my excitement when, on my first day learning Chinese, I discovered the chart of pinyin syllables:

How incredible that all of the possible sounds in an entire language may be represented so simply and logically, and on just one page! Not counting the tones, there are just over 400 possible sounds in Chinese. I’ve forgotten now how many sounds are possible in English, but it’s on the order of tens of thousands.

Very early on in my Chinese study, I became fascinated with the frequency distribution of characters (including tones) within the pinyin chart. Occasionally, the uneven distribution would seem to make linguistic / cultural sense. For example, there is only one common character for the pinyin combination si3, 死, meaning death. Although I’m out of my league in postulating here, one could certainly imagine that as the society developed, the language would be clarified to ensure there wasn’t any confusion about death, hence leaving the word isolated phonetically.

Anyway, over the years, I’ve tracked a lot of unique / unexpected / fascinating things I have discovered about the pinyin chart. And so I thought I’d share some of them here for your curiosity, trivial entertainment, and perhaps aid in your own language pursuit.

First off, here’s a list of pinyin combinations for which there is only one commonly used character. (My unscientific definition of “commonly used” here is that the character is included in my cell phone’s Chinese input system.)

I’ll start easy:

neng 能
gei 给
zhei 这
shei 谁
dei 得
sen 森
nin 您
ri 日
me 么

I really can’t say why this is so interesting to me, but it is. I mean, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of characters for the pinyin “yi.” How come “neng” only gets one?

Ok, now let’s get a little more obscure. Here are a few less common pinyin combinations for which, again, there is only one common character:

fo 佛
dia 嗲
ei 诶
zei 贼
nou 耨
seng 僧
lia 俩
zhuai 拽
lo 咯

Ok, moving on. Here’s a list of unusual pinyin combinations that, although they do have more than one character, you might have rarely encountered before:

Ok, final list for this post. Here’s a few pinyin combinations that technically exist, but are so obscure that my cell phone and even many dictionaries include no characters. Many pinyin tables don’t even include these as possible sound combinations!

tei 忒
rua 挼
chua 欻
den 扽
eng 鞥
kei 剋
nun 黁

Ok, enough for today. Anyone out there know of other obscure pinyin combinations? Lastly, I’ll conclude with some links to more Chinese character esoterica:

This morning, I was impressed to discover CNN.com leading with a story about Al Gore’s testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Gore spoke about the imperative for the United States to negotiate and agree this year to an international treaty to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

I was also encouraged by the tone in these two paragraphs in the article:

During the hearing, Republican staffers handed out a statement contending that there are “significant objections” to claims about climate change. The document, which did not name Gore, said there is “a continued international outpouring of skeptical scientists” along with research “to refute warming fears.”

The idea that the world’s climate is being changed by human activities is supported by studies accepted by the vast majority of scientists with expertise in the field. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science are among groups that have issued reports backing that position.

I am encouraged here for a couple of reasons. First, the article does not hedge on whether or not climate change is being caused by humans. The second paragraph here is simply strong, direct, factual journalism, which is desperately needed to bring US public opinion on climate change more closely in line with reality.

Second, although the article does describe the actions of the climate skeptics, the claims of those skeptics are presented as claims alone (with quotation marks), not as truths. To me, this is journalistically a step in the right direction. By following the Republicans’ “claim” of an “outpouring of skeptical scientists” with a real list of real scientific organizations, the article essentially discredits the claim. (To be fair, a perfect article would have discredited the claim directly, but nonetheless progress is still progress.)

That having been said, though, CNN doesn’t deserve all praise today. It is a daily habit of mine to read the CNN International home page followed by the CNN US page. I do this for a variety of reasons, but primarily I am curious about the differing emphasis and priority assigned to different news stories for the two markets.

And sure enough, my elation over a cover story on climate change was immediately quashed when I discovered that the US edition of CNN did not even feature the story at all on the home page:

What’s going on here? Gore testifying in front of the Senate on climate change is important enough to make the cover of the international page, but on the US page is usurped by such hard-hitting headlines as “Vegetable ad deemed too hot for TV”?

And so the long struggle to change US public opinion on climate change goes on…

Several media and blog sources are reporting the Chinese government’s censorship of Obama’s inaugural address. From the AP:

At one point, Obama said earlier generations “faced down communism and fascism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions.” He later addressed “those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent — know that you are on the wrong side of history.”

Translations of the speech on China’s most popular online portals, Sina and Sohu, were missing the word “communism” in the first sentence. The paragraph with the sentence on dissent had been removed.

Although I trust the AP’s reporting, I still wanted to verify this for myself. Sina.com has a special inauguration page here:

(Interesting side note: the header refers to him as “Jr.,” which I’ve never seen in the Western media, and is not used on his official White House page.)

From Sina’s inauguration page, clicking 发表演说 takes you to a page featuring both a video of the speech and the supposed complete text (全文). Let’s take a closer look at both sensitive instances.

The text on the site is slightly different from the subtitle (“回想先辈们在抵抗法西斯主义之时，他们不仅依靠手中的导弹或坦克”), but still omits “communism.”

Now let’s take a look at the second part, about dissent. This portion starts around 12:50 on the video.

Again, the video itself is not edited, although the subtitles appear to use the word “suppress” instead of “silence.”

Original English: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent”

Subtitles: “对于那些通过腐败、欺骗和镇压异见者来攫取权力的领导人” (“To those leaders who grab power by corruption, deception, and suppression of dissenters”)

In any case, although the censorship of the subtitles doesn’t appear to be too heavy, that of the text version of the speech is. As indicated in the AP article, an entire paragraph is omitted. From what I can tell, these are lines of the speech that are omitted from the Chinese text version on Sina.com:

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society’s ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist. To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders, nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

There is an interesting linguistic debate happening here in China in regards to something Hu Jintao said during his recent speech commemorating the 30th anniversary of China’s reform and opening. While pushing forward with development goals, China should 不动摇，不懈怠，不折腾, which the China Daily translated as “don’t sway back and forth, relax our efforts or get sidetracked.” Everyone seems content with the translation of the first two terms, but there is a lot of debate about the third – 不折腾 (bu4 zhe1 teng) – both what Mr. Hu meant and how to translate it.

What fascinates me is the first suggestion – “bu zheteng” – which is just the Chinese rendered in the standard romanization system, pinyin. The implication being that if it can’t be translated adequately, why try?

Last night, my colleagues, all of whom are Chinese, and I had a discussion about how to translate bu zheteng. They all seem to agree that the best solution is simply for us English-speakers to adopt bu zheteng into our language. What do you think?

Bearing in mind that I’m an engineer, not a linguist, off the top of my head I can think of two categories of Chinese words that have been adopted into the English language:

The first is Chinese words that have been fully integrated and are included in standard English language dictionaries. Examples: tofu, from the Chinese dou4 fu 豆腐, and kung fu, from the Chinese gong1 fu 功夫.

The second is Chinese words that expats living in China routinely use colloquially when speaking to each other, either because no equivalent English word exists, or because it describes perfectly a phenomenon unique to China. Examples:

– chai 拆, meaning to demolish, e.g. “I used to love that restaurant; too bad it got chai’ed last week.”
– mafan 麻烦, meaning troublesome / annoying, e.g. “Traveling during Chinese New Year’s is too much mafan, I think I’ll just stay in Beijing next week.”

My prediction is that bu zheteng will be integrated by expats into the unique brand of Chinglish that we use when speaking to other China expats, but that there is little to no chance that bu zheteng will become the next tofu.

Today is a great day for America, and for the world. Let us rejoice in the triumph over struggle that Mr. Obama’s election represents, and in the desperately needed hope and vision that he so passionately and eloquently brings.

The NYT has a good op-ed today called “Energy Inefficient.” Towards the end, there’s this interesting paragraph:

The Union of Concerned Scientists points out that switching from an S.U.V. that gets 14 miles per gallon to one that gets 16 would save the same amount of fuel as swapping a 35-mile-a-gallon car for a 51-m.p.g. new generation gas-sipper. This is not an argument for more S.U.V.’s. It simply shows that we can wring savings from modest efficiency gains in products we already use.

Since this is somewhat counter-intuitive, I thought a brief explanation might be useful.

The confusion stems directly from the units used to express fuel economy in America. “Miles per gallon,” while perhaps clearer for consumers, is a difficult framework in which to think about resource consumption (since the resource – gallon of gas – is, by definition, fixed).

On the other hand, consider the alternative — flip the term and talk about gallons of fuel used per mile traveled. In the example above, an SUV that gets 14 mpg burns 0.0714 gallons of fuel per mile traveled, or, to make things easier, 7.14 gallons of fuel per 100 miles traveled. The car that gets 35 mpg burns 2.86 gallons of fuel per 100 miles traveled.

First of all, from the perspective of limiting absolute energy consumption, the car is clearly a better choice, and that fact should not be lost in this discussion.

But consider the impact stemming from relative improvements to the two vehicles. If I improve the SUV’s fuel economy from 14 to 16 mpg, my fuel consumption per 100 miles traveled drops by almost a gallon – from 7.14 to 6.25. In other words, I have saved one gallon of fuel as compared with my baseline scenario. To get the same improvement from the car’s baseline, I have to decrease my fuel consumption from 2.86 gallons per 100 miles traveled to 1.96, corresponding to a fuel economy improvement to 51 mpg:

The optimal scenario would of course be to upgrade all your vehicles to 51 mpg (or more). However, given that such an ideal is often not practical or reasonable, comparative analysis as described here can be very beneficial from political, business, and personal perspectives.
—Update 1/20/09:
The Energy Analysis blog has a similar post about this issue, and includes the following relevant graph showing the non-linear relationship between fuel consumption and mpg:

The [Olympic] emission restrictions had an unmistakable impact. During the two months when restrictions were in place, the levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) — a noxious gas resulting from fossil fuel combustion (primarily in cars, trucks, and power plants) — plunged nearly 50 percent. Likewise, levels of carbon monoxide (CO) fell about 20 percent.

The following images show comparative NO2 levels around China during August, 2005-2007 (left) and August, 2008 (right). Note the disappearance of the color red over Beijing in the image on the right.

Much of the air quality discussion on this blog and elsewhere has been about particulate pollution, not NO2 or CO, so it’s nice to see the expanded analysis.

Monitoring of air pollution by satellite is just awesome. Last November, I heard a fascinating presentation by Argonne National Lab’s Dr. David Streets on recent developments in satellite monitoring. It is getting so exact, he said, that, “we are exploring the potential of monitoring the change of power plant emissions in China from space.” He then showed an example of pinpointing the opening of new power plants in Inner Mongolia through satellite observation:

First, the Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities has excellent China air quality data sets available for downloading. For example, Beijing APIs from 2000 to mid-2008 (along with tons of analysis) available on this page. Note that data for other cities may be downloaded at the bottom of the page. Note also the excellent API to pollutant concentration converter on the right.

About Me

I am an American engineer who works on clean transportation for China. I was based in Beijing for nearly seven years, but now I live in San Francisco. This blog is dedicated to exploring miscommunication between China and the West on issues of the environment and beyond.

Contact me at livefrombeijing at gmail dot com.

If citing or linking to this blog, please be mindful of the disclaimers.